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I am interesting in creating a better User Experience (UX). There are a lot of books out there, what are some that would be useful to a software engineer?
My favorites:
User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky. A good first book for programmers. Phrases that will stick in your mind and affect your design, like "People can't control the mouse."
About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper et al. Desktop-centric. Excellent.
Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. Web-centric. Short, easy read, good ideas, some remarks on usability testing.
Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jennifer Tidwell
The Elements of Friendly Software Design by Paul Heckel (out of print, pre-GUI, still some good principles, like "Avoid frustrating the user")
Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques by Kevin Mullet and Darell Sano. Out-of-print, and out-of-date graphics, but still excellent. Good chapter on icons.
The Essential Guide to User Interface Design: An Introduction to GUI Design Principles and Techniques by Wilbert Galitz. Focuses on usage of low-level controls. Good chapter on communicating with the user.
At some point in your career, you may enjoy this wonderful book that draws parallels across multiple fields of design. (For example, the "confirmation" technique occurs both in software design and nuclear launch control.)
Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell
it's specific to Web UX, but Steve Krug's Don't Make me Think is really interesting (and short, which always helps!). And to be fair, some of it translates to non-web apps too.
As well as giving you advice on the design of the UX, it talks about usability testing, which is something I think a lot more apps should do. (Websites too, but most of them do it already).
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.
I would also recommend The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems by Jef Raskin. Has some really inspiring ideas.
Look up "The Design of Every day things", by Donald Norman. It was mandatory reading for the UI courses when I was in university.
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What is the best way to learn about programming design? I see lots of tutorials for programming languages, but a lot of them focus on specific language syntax. I want to really get into the aspects of design, using programs efficiently, etc. Where should I start?
Read a book on algorithms.
Learn OOP and read a book on Design Patterns
Realize that making code readable is often more important than making it as efficient as possible, and most optimization should be left up to your compiler.
If by programming design you mean design patterns, there are two books which are "classic" books for Design Patterns:
- Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, written by Martin Fowler;
- Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, written by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides (they're refered as GANG OF FOUR, or GoF).
To show their theories in practice, they usually pick a language whose object-orientation support is good to show their examples.
Martin Fowler uses Java and the Gang Of Four use Smalltalk and C++ but if you have any previous programming experience (which I believe you do), you can understand most of it.
Best of luck
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My thesis topic is about Domain Specific languages in general, I want to focus on design or implementation for external or internal DSLs but I can't even think or start because I am facing problems with understanding the concept of DSLs ..
I have read and collected so many papers and surveys about this issue but all of them I consider as advanced.. I need a good tutorial ( for beginners ) to understand the whole concept and phases for DSLs from the scratch ..
I have read the first chapter for DSL by Martin Fowler , Fowler started with state machines and hard programming codes from the first page of his book and the problem is that I am not very good in programming in general, I have no experience, my thesis will be a survey about DSLs with no programming work. Until now I don't know what to focus on because the survey should be specific on on area like designing techniques or comparisons in designing or implementing , but because I cant get the big picture I can't even decide. Any suggestions about this issue also I will really appreciate that.
Please help me and thank you very much. I always look at the questions and answers in this great website and I believe that I will find a solution for my nightmare problem here!
Thanks a lot
Nat
This book is Bible for DSL's in my opinion. This book used to be free when it was in draft. You can also find other learning resources there.
Go through this post to find successful DSL's. This post might help you in identifying various flavors and various domains where they are being used.
It will be a lot of work for you if you want to understand it, so if you are not skillful with programming, learn it or choose easier thesis.
I wrote my thesis about model driven software development and domain specific languages withouth even a basic knowledge about modeling etc. It can be done, but I spent much time reading (which I enjoyed).
For the most basic introduction I would recommend se-radio.net podcast episodes 5 and 6 (...and there are many more about more advanced topics on MDSD/DSLs).
I'd read James Neighbors thesis, after reading his executive summary. He's the guy that defined the terms "domain analysis" and "domain engineering" in the context of defining "domain specific languages". And he shows a program generation system, Draco, that generates an astonishing variety of complex application codes based on these ideas. (The thesis is a lot more readable than you might expect, but expect to see some real code!).
You can read some history on this topic, too, and once again, how those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.
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I'm interested in learning video game algorithms. (For iPhone particularly, but generally as well. I assume certain concepts are the same.) I am best off (personally) learning from a book but websites are useful too.
What has helped you learn game programming algorithms and concepts?
EDIT:
As per request, I'll clarify the types of algorithms... I was looking for any algorithms really, but I guess I was interested in (top-down view) platformer algorithms, but, now that you mention it, Seth, I do wonder about chess...
EDIT2:
I'm making this a Community Wiki due to the nature of the question.
I am interested in 2D platformer algorithms at the moment. I would like to remake an old video game (a personal favorite, publisher now defunct.)
I'd recommend Realtime Collision Detection by Christer Ericson ( Director of Tools and Technology at Sony Santa Monica Studios - aka God of War ) - despite the title it covers a wider range of approaches than just collison detection including - data structures and algorithms for modern games development.
A lot of computer games coding is also simply good old-fashioned coding i.e data structures + algorithms so don't forget the two classics:
The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth
Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley
There are also some excellent on-line R&D references on games development by many studios such as:
Mike Acton's Blog
Insomniac's R&D Site
Valve's site
DICE's site
There's some information atGamestruction which is a stack exchange based site, or you could ask this question there too.
You could try GameDev.net, DevMaster.net or Gamasutra for various game development resources.
There are various games development wikis including ones at GameDev.net and DevMaster.net and one at GPWiki.org
I don't think there is any one definitive source for game development algorithms, there are so many different ways to approach game development even within a single genre.
The best advice I can give it to learn by playing with existing technology, get a hold of some game frameworks and go through their tutorials. I don't know of many for iPhone but you could look at the Torque Game Engine or Ogre3D for PC based technologies. Microsoft's XNA Framework is also an excellent starting point for console development. Any of those will give you a good idea of the basic structure of a game project and some of the core algorithms like pathfinding, collision detection etc.
If you'd rather read book though, I always recommend the Game Programming Gems series, last I looked they had six or seven volumes but they all contain collections of articles on all aspects fo game development.
Best of Game Programming Gems
These titles are a few years old, but have updated versions at this time. Pay attention specifically to the computational geometry content.
Andre LaMothe - "Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus"
http://www.amazon.com/Andre-Lamothe/e/B000ARBG92/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1
and
Corment, Leiserson, et. al. - "Introduction to Algorithms"
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Thomas-Cormen/dp/0072970545/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2
Artificial Intelligence in Game Design
Math and Physics # gamedev.net
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I am currently trying to make the transition from a technical PM to a Developer.
Obviously this depends very much on current level of knowledge / experience, but are there some key things that a PM (who also codes regularly) might have missed from not strictly working as a Developer.
Also would a course like this help in the right direction?
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/computing/teaching/postgraduate/msc-computing-science/description
Considering I want to work on Audio/Video/3D ideally, I feel this course could be a good leg up?
As a technical PM you have the advantage of knowing the terminology etc so that is at least a heads start. As to making the switch check out information on areas such as
computing fundamentals - low level concepts on computer hardware, network and protocols.
algorithms - for an understanding of sorting, graphs, networks, trees, etc.
architecture and design - web application architecture, messaging architecture, UML, use cases, documentation.
programming languages - OO, scripting and AI (at least to get a feel for the types and applications)
business end of programming - software estimation
This is a broad spectrum of areas that you would need to have at least some exposure to for the transition. In fact it might even be useful if your current employer allowed you to work as the developer on a small part of a project. You'd certainly gain respect from the developers on a project coming from the technical PM role and could even enlighten the developers.
If you have a passion for working in an area, seriously consider the amount of creative freedom, in your experience, developers have as compared to PMs. Make sure that's acceptable to you.
Nothing is worse than having passion in an area, but little or no influence.
As far as technical abilities go, the only thing to do is to code. Any classes primarily will act as ways to ensure that you do so, and do so in ways that will teach you. But at the end of the day, it's going to boil down to time spent writing software.
If you really want to become a great developer, learn at least one language radically different from the languages you know. If you're a Java/C++/C# kind of guy, learn something that will really torque your brain like Haskell, Erlang, or Scheme. To just learn really good OO techniques, learn, read, and write some Smalltalk.
The best thing to do is to spend ten years or so programming during every waking moment. That's what worked for me!
First of all get start practicing to type all day ! Then get ready to work on minute details which a developer works on everyday like... code shortcuts, coding styles, commenting etc.
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i'm currently in the process of modifying a legacy editor application and i need to add in a few data structures which i have made into a class of it's own which i later add to a collection object. but thus far i'm little bit blurry on where to put all of my functions which is related to that object. i'm thinking maybe OO like design, but i'm not quite sure how to do this in vb6. else all the functions are currently in a module mdl file. which are set as public function.
is there any good reference, book or whatever which i can learn more about how to properly design for vb6 app? for the current work and for future work i guess.
thanks.
Are you familiar with Rocky Lhotka's work? I would recommend reading Visual Basic 6 Business Objects.
Visual Basic 6 Business Objects provides a thorough introduction to employing objects that are used to model real-world business problems.
You can also visit www.lhotka.net
Edit :
I know it sounds like a lot of trouble, but I would really recommend you take the time and read Rocky's book. He talks about simulating OOP principles eg. like simulating inheritance in vb6 ect.
Another good source of information is Deborah Kurata, she's written a series of books about OO coding in VB. Less well known than Rocky Lhotka (who is excellent), and concentrates more on pure OO, not the ORM/DB layer that he does.
All the reference cited so far are good. However the Design Patterns by the Gang Of Four is usable for Visual Basic 6. The trick to remember that most of the pattern talked about in Design Patterns rely on implementing interfaces which VB6 can do well. In fact you will find most design patterns involve implementing interfaces.
This is because most design patterns focus on setting up how various objects interact as opposed to reusing behavior. So interface become much more important.
Design Patterns by the GoF
Patterns by Martin Fowler
The various GUI and presentation patterns is the most applicable in my opinion.
My own application is structured completely as a series of design patterns. For example I use a Passive View for my presentation layer. The various views called command objects which does the actual modifications of the model. I use factories to retrieve the list of reports, file types, and shapes my software support. All done in VB6 using the Design Patterns book by the GoF.
Before getting deep into the theological aspects of OOP those books cover you might begin by simply reading the VB6 documentation. In particular the sections on component design.